Understanding Awstats

KNCI Hosting provides customers with a program called Awstats, which is accessible from CPanel, to learn more about the visitors to your web site. Here is some information about Awstats and guidance on how to understand the data presented.

When you first open Awstats, it displays stats from the current month. You can use the drop-down box at the top of the page to select a different month, or an entire year.

Statistics on numbers of visitors are shown for the whole period, as well as shown in a graph comparing traffic per month, day of the month, day of the week, and time of day, so that you can see if there were any spikes in traffic during particular periods.

The following terms are used to describe the traffic numbers…

Unique visitors – how many different “people” visited your site (this is determined by the address of the computer that was used)

Visits – how many times someone visited the site, but people are counted multiple times, so if you go to the site daily, each visit is counted here

Pages – total number of pages visited and average per visit (how many pages were viewed by each visitor, on average)

Hits – total number of files accessed (a hit is counted for every single element that is loaded int the brower; each page and image are counted separately, so this number is usually much larger, and not as useful)

To see the most popular pages:

Click Viewed under the Navigation section in the left menu.

Entry is how many visits started on that page.

Exit is how many visits ended on that page.

To see how people found the site:

Click Origin and Search under the Referrers section in the left menu.

Origins will show you where people came from.

Search shows a listing of the search terms and phrases used to find the site.